Description

Corrinne Yu is the Principal Engine Architect for Halo Team Microsoft. In this video, she drops by the Channel 9 Studio for Part Two of her interview. You can watch
Part One here. All questions for Corrinne were asked by YOU, the Channel 9 audience. Here is a list of some of the questions she answers:

JamboGT: I am currently at a University where I am studying C++ programming, game design and game system architecture as well as a few other related modules. What I want to ask you is what extra things should I take onboard myself to learn
that would help in regards to the industry and help me stand out from the other prospective games programmers?

Keithoconor: Given the possibilities the raw horsepower of the SPU has opened up for parallelizing graphics techniques that would otherwise be impractical in real-time, what sort of processor architecture would you like to see prevailing
in the next generation of Xbox and consoles in general?

Ion Todirel: Suppose you are on a team who develops a game for 2 different platforms, e.g. XBOX360 and PS3. You (Corrinne) mentioned that you prefer to own the code bases, what would you do in this case, have 2 separate code bases with some
common ground or use an engine that has ports on both platforms? Or port your own engine to PS3 (that would presumably end with another code base)?

Ion Todirel: What do you think about XNA, does it have a place outside of arcade games? Could there be a place for Bartok in the video games industry?

Magicalclick: I want to know, anything from mesh/texture generation concept? And tools that can produce a really nice looking mesh/texture during gameplay without much processing?

Ecaradec: You talked about frequency space in a precedent interview. What kind of issues are best solved in frequency space? How much of an engine is rewritten between games? Do you have some advice on software design?

not sure im anyone to argue with the likes of corrine but i do disagree that one should always try and get as close to the metal as possible.. im not sure thats even possible with pc (vs console) because of the massive hardware diversity, but even so, corrine
argues that for every game you should rewrite your shading because that perticular game will have diffrent requirement and also that writing a general shading algorithim is not possible.

well fine, but in that case shouldnt we write a diffrent shading algorithm for each individual shadow? what i mean is that you'll always have to generalize a little

by not over specifying exactly how every pixel should be drawn the system can do optimizatins that would be impractical for a human to do.. i guess im biased since im a managed developer..